


Life Cycles

by JWood201



Category: Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Betazed, Captain Crandall cameo!, Durango Troi, F/M, Family, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Ian Andrew Troi is the Arthur Weasley of Betazed, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Nepenthe, antiques
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:21:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23723767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JWood201/pseuds/JWood201
Summary: “Imzadi, it’s not the same. These items have age, weight of memory. These things belonged to people. This is history.”
Relationships: Ian Andrew Troi I/Lwaxana Troi
Comments: 2
Kudos: 27





	Life Cycles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RainaWrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainaWrites/gifts).



> This is an incredibly belated birthday fic for RainaWrites. Thanks for talking me off the Twitter ledge and sending me memes!

Relics. Artifacts.

 _Antiques_ , he called them, holding aloft a hard green rectangle with a milky opaque lid.

Deanna let the word roll around in her head, the popping consonants, the lifted vowels, the silences, the clashing.

_Antiques._

“What is that?” her mother asked from behind the large crate that he had dumped in the middle of her desk.

Ian Troi beamed. “Tupperware.”

Lwaxana paused for one perfectly timed beat. “What?”

“Before replicators and reclamators, people were very concerned about waste, so they saved the remains of their meals to be eaten later.” He held the rectangle up to the light. “ _Leftovers._ ”

“Wow,” Deanna breathed, eyes wide, but her mother looked bored.

Ian dove back into the crate and emerged with a handful of odd-shaped implements. “Here.”

He arranged them grandly on the desk in front of his wife, who raised one perfect eyebrow. “Mr. Xelo prefers the replicator,” she informed him.

“I know, but now we have these things. You know, just … in case.”

Perched on the edge of the desk, Deanna turned around to face her mother expectantly. It was her turn. Lwaxana folded her hands on her desk diplomatically. “Just in case … what?”

Deanna turned back to her father. The tips of his ears had turned pink. “Um. Well. Just in case … I want to learn how to cook. Wait!” He reached into the crate again and Deanna peered over the edge into its depths. “Look at this! It’s a telephone. Shaped like a _hamburger_.”

“Why?”

“ _WHY?_ ” Ian nearly fell over.

Deanna opened the bun and peered at the plastic numbers embedded in the cheese. The cord hung down between her swinging feet to coil on the floor.

“Why _not_? It’s hilarious. It’s a novelty!” Ian retrieved the spatula from Lwaxana’s desk and held it up to his ear. “Hello? Durango, is that you?”

Deanna answered the hamburger. “Daddy?”

“How are you?”

“Fine, thank you. How are you?”

Behind the desk, Lwaxana had her face in her hands. Ian and Deanna exchanged looks.

“Is she all right?” Ian said into the spatula.

“I’ll check.” Deanna started to close the phone, but remembered her manners from old Earth movies and put it back to her ear. “Bye.” She closed the bun and crawled across the desk to her mother, trying to peer into her face. “Are you okay?”

When Lwaxana lifted her head, she was laughing. “My father told me not to marry a human man.” She grinned. “Non-stop nonsense, he said.” Her curls bounced on top of her head as she laughed. “I’m afraid he was right, Little One.” She took Deanna’s face in her hands and kissed her forehead.

“Xana?”

“Yes, darling?” She wiped a tear from her cheek.

“Hello?” he said into the spatula, making a grand show of peering around the room. “Lwaxana?” 

She nearly growled. “Ian…”

“Answer the hamburger, Mommy.”

“I will not.”

“Come on, it’s fun.” Deanna held the round plastic monstrosity out to her, eyes wide. 

Lwaxana collapsed under the weight of her sigh and took the telephone, holding it away from her face. “Yes?”

Ian’s face lit up. “My love! There you are!” Lwaxana rolled her eyes. “So, I can keep everything?”

“Darling, I don’t know why you can’t just replicate a … a …” Lwaxana waved her hand vaguely at the crate.

“A salad spinner?” Ian revealed another plastic contraption.

Lwaxana’s head tipped slightly in disbelief, but she said nothing.

Ian frowned. “Imzadi, it’s not the same. These items have age, weight of memory. These things _belonged_ to people. This is history.”

Lwaxana watched Deanna pull a doll and a stack of paper books out of the crate, gasping with each new discovery. Her new cowboy hat hung down her back, its band frayed, felt brim bent under the weight of its years. It wasn’t perfect, but it was to her. Deanna opened one of the books and ran her fingers over the faded handwriting swirling across its first page. Ink. _Happy Birthday, wild girl. All my love, Mommy._

Lwaxana closed her eyes for a moment as she closed the hamburger phone. “All right.” Ian and Deanna’s faces broke open in identical brilliant grins and Lwaxana smiled before she could stop herself. “But! You need to find a home for everything. I won’t live in a house where the Tupperware has taken over.”

Ian tossed the spatula into the corner and pulled himself across her desk on his stomach, pushing ancient kitchen tools and PADDs into her lap, until their foreheads met. “They used to do that.”

“Do what?”

“Have Tupperware parties.”

Her eyes widened. “Ian Andrew Troi, I will not –!”

He kissed her and her protest died in her throat. “You’re the best. I love you.” He pushed himself back onto the floor. “Come on, Durango!” He hoisted Deanna up on his back. “I brought you something else from Earth. It’s outside!”

\-----

Deanna Troi stared into the darkened outbuilding, a churning wave of teenage curiosity having propelled her across the garden to her father’s private space. 

A garage. A shed. 

A _Man Cave_ , he called it. Lwaxana had rolled her eyes and left him alone.

“Lights,” she whispered. Nothing happened. “Computer?” No response.

Then she remembered and reached for the old fashioned switch on the wall. Lights flickered above her, lazy from disuse, sputtering before blazing to life, illuminating the small space that had lain dormant for half her life. It was a treasure trove, a cave of wonders, a time capsule of not only her father, but of cultures and families before him.

Shelves of tools and artifacts lined three walls. Computerized and mechanical, analog and digital, battery-powered and human-powered. Anything and everything that one day might prove useful or interesting. Or not, he wasn’t picky. He liked things just because they existed. 

On the fourth wall, Ian hung a perfect eclectic collage of history. Prints of famous paintings, movie posters and old metal advertisement signs. Magazine covers and raggedy orphaned book covers and sheet music cover art from old Hollywood movie musicals and Broadway extravaganzas. Scattered among the artwork were personal photographs of strangers that had fallen out of his newly acquired treasures, used as bookmarks or hidden pleasant surprises. These people became his friends and he became their legacy. He named them and he remembered them.

In the center of the room, glowing in the sunlight streaming in through the skylight, speckles of dust swirling in the newly disturbed air, was her bicycle. 

It needed a lot of restoration work when her father brought it home from Earth years ago. The bicycle was covered in grime and dirt, one wheel unattached and leaning against the side of the house when Deanna first saw it, but she thought it was the most amazing thing she’d ever seen. The freedom it symbolized was intoxicating in its possibilities. Ian promised her they’d begin working on it right away, even though she was still too small to reach the pedals.

“You can be my assistant,” Ian said. “We’ll bring it back to life.”

“Can I use the tools?” she asked.

“Of course! All good assistants have to learn how to use the tools.” Ian frowned at her dress, three shades of purple and three layers of ruffles. “You’ll get dirty, though.”

A slow smile stretched across little Deanna’s face. “Good.”

He left on the _Carthage_ the following month.

Deanna waited for him to return with another crate of treasures, things no one else saw the beauty in, to rescue more forgotten souls for his wall. She would go out to the shed and look at her bicycle, propped up in the center of the room, waiting for her. She tried to figure out which tools did which jobs.

There was one job she could do, though. On the back of the bicycle, beneath the seat, was her favorite part. It wasn’t crucial, but it was necessary to her, the reason her father brought this specific bicycle home and not one in better condition. Armed with a wet rag and a small bucket of suds, Deanna knelt down in front of the small metal plate. Apparently, ancient human children liked to label things as their own. As she cleared the dirt away, she discovered that the plate was white with red script across the top: _California_.

Carefully, one by one, the cloth revealed that the raised letters below were blue.

_D._

First they would clean everything, Ian had explained before he left. Scrub it down and see how much of the original paint was left.

_E._

She could get a head start on that. Look how much progress she had made already.

_A._

Then they needed to reattach the wheel. She didn’t know how to do that, but he would be home soon to teach her.

_N._

Something about a chain next. The pedals didn’t turn right. Some dents and dings to smooth out. A squished basket on the front needed repair. Something to hold her own treasures.

_N._

Then, paint. Her favorite color. She still couldn’t decide, but she would know when the time came.

_A._

She sat down on a toolbox, the ancient license plate gleaming white on the dirty bike. She thought about the other Deanna who had once owned this bicycle. Was she good at riding? Where did she go? What happened to her?

Deanna dropped the rag into the bucket and looked around the room. She sat alone in the square of sunlight on the floor, particles floating around her, the silence pressing in on her from all sides, and waited for her father to come home.

When Elias Vaughn finally brought Ian back to Betazed draped in a Federation flag and Lwaxana fell apart, Deanna locked the door to the shed and forgot all about her father’s treasures.

But now Deanna stood in her father’s haven for the first time in a long time. Her bicycle was right where she left it in the square of sunlight, a fresh coat of dust brushing each surface. The toolbox was there. Her bucket. The old rag.

The first thing she did was clean off the license plate. She wanted to make sure it was still hers, that this relic from another lifetime was still the same.

Then, the research. Deanna was good at research, so she did a lot of it. She learned about the tools, the parts of a bicycle, how to repair a bike chain. The computer showed her a lot of charts and specifications and theory. She asked it how to ride a bicycle, and the computer showed her dozens of old videos of fathers teaching their children how to balance, how to pedal, how to be brave. She scowled and curtly shut the computer off, striding from her mother’s office. 

Chandra wanted to help, but she was impulsive and clumsy and took up too much space in her father’s treasury, so Deanna had to lovingly but firmly ban her from the project. She replaced gear cables. She recovered the seat. Finally, under the watchful eye of her father’s rescued families, book cover models and long-dead actors, she carefully painted the bicycle a glimmering purple.

When she was finally done, she sat down on the toolbox in the quiet room and silently congratulated herself. It had taken a long time, but she was meticulous and knew she had engineered it properly, coaxed it back to life slowly and gently like an injured bird. She hoped the other Deanna would be proud of her. She knew her father would be.

“Mother?”

“Yes, Little One?” Lwaxana didn’t look up from the PADD she was studying.

“Hello? Mother?”

“Deanna, what –?” Her fourteen-year-old daughter stood in the center of her office holding a spatula to her ear.

“Are you there?” Deanna made a big show of looking around the room.

Lwaxana set the PADD aside and froze. In the center of her desk was Ian’s ancient plastic hamburger phone, a perfect orange circle in the middle of the gleaming dark wood, its cord snaking away across the grain and disappearing over the edge like a skinny waterfall.

She saw them both, bathed in the hazy sunlight of yesterday. Deanna, seven years old, sitting on the edge of the desk, cowboy hat slumped down her back, hamburger phone held out to her in a tiny hopeful hand. Ian, pacing the room, spatula to his ear, perfect.

“Mommy?”

Lwaxana reappeared, blinking him away, and reached out for the telephone. She held the hamburger up to her ear with shaking hands. “Yes, darling?”

Deanna’s face lit up. “Mom! There you are!” She turned to face her mother and Lwaxana saw Ian in the gleam in her dark eyes. “Will you teach me how to ride a bicycle?”

Lwaxana’s face crumpled under her daughter’s hopeful smile. “I don’t know how.”

Two days later, Lwaxana stood in the street, wearing a freshly replicated pair of pants, tight and shiny and completely in character, and her most comfortable boots, high and shiny and completely impractical, staring across the bicycle at her equally apprehensive daughter. “Well?”

Deanna shrugged, cowboy hat sliding down her back. “Well?”

\-----

On the morning of Kestra’s fourteenth birthday, Deanna Troi woke to find her mother standing in the yard, resplendent in a shimmering orange gown. The early morning Nepenthene sunlight refracted against her skirt at unexpected angles, casting the dewy air in an eerie dream light. Captain Crandall stood a few steps behind, surrounded by Lwaxana’s luggage.

It took her another moment to process the contrast. Her mother was glowing in the mist like the queens in Kestra’s fairy tale books, but she had a frayed cowboy hat hanging down her back and held on to the handlebars of an ancient Earth bicycle.

It gleamed in the sunlight, fresh purple paint, a woven basket with a big red bow on the front. Though she couldn’t see it, she knew from the sudden palpable jolt of memory that there was an old tin license plate bearing her name on the back. And she knew from her daughter’s excitement vibrating in the back of her mind that a new plate with Kestra’s name hung beneath it.

“Mom!” Kestra stood in the grass on the other side of her birthday present. Deanna gasped when she saw her, bare feet skidding on the deck boards. Will shuffled out of the house behind her, coffee mug in one hand, and caught her arm before she toppled over.

“Kestra? What –?”

“Are you there?” Her daughter held a spatula to her ear as she looked off into the distance. She was laughing so hard she could hardly speak. Captain Crandall eyed the scene dubiously.

Lwaxana approached, an orange pillar of fire crossing the grass, and pressed something into Deanna’s hands. “Don’t worry, I still have the Tupperware,” she whispered.

“Imzadi, what –?”

Lwaxana shushed Will gently and tucked her hand around his elbow, plucking his coffee mug from his hand.

Deanna cradled the plastic hamburger phone carefully, its cord spiraling down onto the deck between her feet, and she saw him in the early morning haze. Ian paced, a quivering ball of energy, throwing kitchen implements around the yard. He grinned mischievously and nodded with approval at her rustic cabin.

“Durango?”

Ian disappeared and Deanna looked up. Kestra's new bike leaned against her hip and she was making a big show of looking around the yard, alternating between giggling and rolling her eyes at her grandmother. Deanna opened the phone and raised it to her ear. “Yes, honey?”

Kestra’s face lit up. “Mom! There you are!” Deanna saw Ian in her hopeful lopsided smile. “Will you teach me how to ride a bicycle?”


End file.
